


Not a Robot

by squireofgeekdom



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: AroAce James Wesley, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 13:21:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5050147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squireofgeekdom/pseuds/squireofgeekdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is something most people know: vampires are monsters.</p><p>Here is something many people know: vampires have no reflections.</p><p>Here is something true: you can make someone a monster by denying them a reflection.</p><p>Here is something else true: tell someone what they are long enough, they will become it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a Robot

Here is something most people know: vampires are monsters.

Here is something many people know: vampires have no reflections.

Here is something true: you can make someone a monster by denying them a reflection.

Here is something else true: tell someone what they are long enough, they will become it.

James Wesley is told he is a robot. 

He is told he is other things, of course, but robot is the one that sticks. It is specific in a way that ‘freak’ isn’t. 

He is told this by his brother, his father, the children at school. He is told this by half a dozen mob bosses, told it after being dragged to half the strip clubs in New York at the insistence that he needed to loosen up, at one memorable point shouted it at gunpoint for insulting a man’s whorehouse by not partaking.

James Wesley builds a house in the uncanny valley. 

He cultivates a reputation as ‘unsettling’, carefully watering it, weeding it, relishing it when the word blooms on others lips.

He trains himself not to care, because if he can’t care in the way that matters to everyone else, why bother at all?

He means what he says to Karen Page in the warehouse, years later. Growing to love something is really forgetting what you dislike about it. 

It takes him only a few days to form a positive impression of Mr. Fisk, but much longer to stop waiting for the penny to drop. He’s worked with employers who are soft-spoken before, earnest, remember their underlings’ names. Not often, but he has. 

The penny always drops. The mask always falls.

Whatever shred of caring had seemed to be there, it is a facade. It crumbles under pressure. 

With Mr. Fisk, it doesn’t. Wesley considers that the facade must be made of steel until he realizes one day that it simply doesn’t exist.

Oh, he knows about his violence. Expected it. What he didn’t expect was for it to be so earnest. 

The irony of someone so practiced in not caring becoming attached to someone who cares so much does not go unnoticed. 

\---

Most of his job, he finds, is keeping Mr. Fisk’s public meetings to a minimum. He initially assumes this is a power play, maintaining distance and mystery. Eventually, he realizes that Mr. Fisk is deeply uncomfortable in public.

For some reason, that makes him double his efforts.

He wouldn’t say he loved Wilson Fisk. Even if that wouldn’t have been an unacceptable show of weakness for someone in his position, it wasn’t something he would ever think to say about anyone. The word ‘love’ isn’t meant for robot tongues. 

But if he was going to say it, it would be after one of the rare public meetings went awry, a potential business partner storming out of the lounge at the hotel bar where Wesley had arranged the meeting. He could have kicked himself for arranging a meeting in such a public place - he had thought -

It didn’t matter what he had thought. He had failed.

Mr. Fisk still has a drink in his hands. The glass has snapped in his grip, glass shards on the table. He doesn’t see any blood, thank God. 

“Sir? Sir, we should go.” 

He’s already half reaching for his phone to call Francis, mentally calculating how long it will take him to bring the car around versus how long it will take them to get to the street, and he almost doesn’t notice when Mr. Fisk says “No.”

His train of thought screeches to a halt. “Sir?” 

A waitress is hovering in their vicinity, Mr. Fisk looks up at her, not quite making eye contact. “Excuse me,” She quickly steps over. Wesley watches her closely for any signs she might be carrying a concealed weapon, but she seems like another of the hotel waitresses. “I’m - sorry about the glass. Could I get another? And, Wesley -”

And that is how he finds himself, very bemused, sitting across from his employer in a hotel lounge with a drink in one hand. 

He’s fairly confident that at any second this is going to fall apart. His new seat gives him a view of the door, and much of the bar, but his back is to the rest of the room. He keeps a careful eye on new arrivals, knowing that their disgruntled potential business partner might decide he liked them even less than he thought he did. 

There is a woman walking towards the bar, watching them as she does. There’s something in her purse, but he can’t tell now if it’s a weapon or just a cell phone. 

“She’s very pretty.” His employer observes, having apparently noted his line of sight. 

She sits down at the bar and crosses her legs, moving her purse at an angle so that the outline of the object becomes more distinct. 

“She has a stun gun in her purse.” Wesley says.

“Ah.” Mr. Fisk looks at her again. “Not - interested, then?”

“No,” 

It’s not that this hasn’t happened before, Mr. Fisk pointing out women, or sometimes men. It’s a habit people seem to have, he’s gotten quite used to brushing it off from other employers. So he couldn’t tell you why he says anything else now. 

Maybe it’s because he was just so damn grateful that there wasn’t blood on the broken glass.

“Not really interested in anyone, particularly.” He says, looking down at his drink, fingers wrapped tightly around it to brace himself.

“Ah.” Mr. Fisk says. “I - apologize for bothering you, then.”

He blinks rapidly, and then looks up to make sure he hasn’t lost track of the woman at the bar. When he comes back to focus on the conversation, Mr. Fisk moves on to asking him about his drink, and Wesley accepts that he won’t ever work for anyone else.

\---

Mr. Fisk will always have enemies. Enemies will always be looking for a weak link. 

Some of them think it’s him, at first, when he is still new in his position as Fisk’s right hand man. People try to sidle their way into his attentions, thinking that they can get him to spill his guts if they can get in bed with him, plant their own inside man by seizing his affections.

He ignores them all. 

He knows what they think after that. He knows what they mean when they call him Fisk’s lapdog, among other things.

He doesn’t care.

They aren’t calling him a robot anymore.


End file.
